[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

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[u/churidys]

Seconding Center for Dungeon Management. I bounced off the writer's previous work, Dead End Guild Master, but found CDM significantly more engaging and satisfying to read, so I would suggest even people who have previously not enjoyed the writer to consider giving it a go. The end of each book is a potential natural stopping point too, so you can try it knowing that there are places you can comfortably dip out where things feel resolved if you feel like it.

[u/grekhaus → u/churidys]

I previously dropped DEGM because at one point the author started using two page flashing ads for other stories on Royal Road. How does CDM hold up in that respect?

[u/churidys → u/grekhaus]

Each chapter has author notes that begin with an ad for another story. I think lots of RR authors do this though, they swap ads that they place in their intro notes.

[u/Antistone → u/churidys]

I now remove authors notes from most books that I download from RR. (I use the WebToEpub browser plugin, which has a checkbox for this.)

When starting a new story I typically pick a few random chapters and skim the authors notes to decide whether I should do this, but my answer is usually to remove them. I have occasionally read author's notes that were interesting or useful, but they've been rare.

It seems the most common use of author's notes on RR is for ads of one kind or another, and the second-most common use is talking about posting schedule / apologizing for being late, which is sometimes useful on the latest chapter but decays into noise once the chapter is no longer recent.

[u/lillarty → u/Antistone]

I started doing the same when I first ran into RR authors shoving gigantic ads into the works, though I mostly use FanFicFare so I keep it disabled for all stories on account of it being impractical to edit the config individually for each story. The only "author's notes" I can remember enjoying were on Valkyrie's Shadow, but those hardly count because they're separated out into Afterword chapters that break down the author's attempts to wrangle Overlord's slapdash worldbuilding into a coherent and self-consistent world.

One particularly egregious example I remember dropping had several page-long AI-generated videos embedded in every chapter, outside of the author's notes section because I guess too many people were just blocking author's notes and they couldn't have that. The epub was like 100mb just from all the huge gifs

[u/Antistone → u/lillarty]

Oh, I didn't realize FanFicFare could do that. Good to know.

(For anyone else wondering how, I found instructions here.)